Day 68: Bark at the moon with Mark E Smith...

So this is actually today's as far as I can tell, hope you've enjoyed today's mixed bag of entries, will be doing my utmost to keep up as I keep saying, but here we go with another one!



Song: Wolf Kidult Man
Album: Imperial Wax Solvent
Year: 2007

So this is a rough-as-hell bluesy number with some very cool vocals, cooly delivered I mean, its MES visiting film noir again, this is a great big dirty number and sounds as if it has been scraped along a concrete floor before being mastered.

The guitars buzz with that 'garage band' feel MES has been so keen to deliver for years, her sounding like they have been recorded in one, the earthed amps you can almost see, their grills shaking the cobwebs of long-dead spiders loose. This is The Fall getting mean and meaning it, the drums clatter and crash, the production on Mark's vocals seems to hiss and steam.

The lyrics here are part-mythological, concerning a werewolf I imagine, the sample at the start, a primeval howl, signals the dark nature of the song, but as usual, MES mixes in some current references, 'Where is your mum?' being a particularly funny example, taking out the serious side of an often po-faced legend (you know the type of thing, that Twilight nonsense being a good example).

Mark's love of The Twilight Zone (the only twilight show worth watching) rears its head again, as a recording of the episode Printers Devil appears at the end, again cementing the weird, sci-fi elements of the song. I love the fact he can slip in references like this now and again, something completely self-indulgent, but something we fans can sink our teeth into (no pun intended).